THOUGH POETRY PREDATES LITERACY, AND THE SONNET HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, IT TOOK ME ONLY TEN MINUTES TO BUTCHER ONE

by Jesse DeLong

Twenty-eight years—most of them spent fumbling
with the wrappers of candy bars—have passed before I became
curious enough about the brain to find, on the shelves
of a Baton Rouge library, a book by Dennett, 20 years old now,
which mentions, in passing, a work by Bach, who labored
for four years to create and redraft the final version
of St. Matthew Passion. Bach was over fifty, though it took roughly
two millennia for Christianity, the nest where the song cradled, to emerge,
and somewhere between a hundred millennia and three million years,
depending on when we decide to date the birth
of human culture, to evolve the social and cultural environment
where Christianity could spawn. Before that, it took three billion
years to create humans. Should I keep going? You are an accident,
and not just the type where your father forgets to pull out.